This invention relates to cooling of computing system environments and more particularly to immersion cooling of electronic components used in large computing systems environments having one or more servers.
The industry trend has been to continuously increase the number of electronic components inside computing systems. Given the limited footprint of many computing systems, a continuous increase in the number of heat generating components creates challenging heat dissipation issues. These issues if not dealt with adequately can harm the structural and data integrity of the computer system, making the effect felt both at a system and module level.
Most electronic packages or nodes in large environments are housed in stacks disposed in frames that resemble racks or cages. Traditionally, these electronic packages have been cooled by forced air cooling using air moving devices, such as fans and blowers, selectively disposed somewhere in the environment as to allow optimum air flow. These air moving devices are often designed to displace hot air away from the components by creating parallel air flow paths that circulate through the rack or cage like frame or structure.
As the packaging densities increase, however, the air cooling solutions are becoming more prohibitive and costly. In addition, air cooling has other associated costs in the form of unwanted acoustic and energy consumption characteristics. In large data centers that house many computing environments in close proximity, the heat dissipation issue is exacerbated even more. In such cases, cooling costs and feasibility of providing air cooling have become a burden to many businesses that rely on their data centers.
In recent years, direct or indirect liquid cooling has become a more attractive option for the designers of computing systems. Liquid cooling has been shown to be substantially less burdensome both in terms of energy costs and resource allocations, especially for use in data centers. Prior art FIG. 1 is a top-down illustration of a conventional cold plate used for that employs indirect liquid cooling. Traditionally, as illustrated in FIG. 1, indirect liquid cooling techniques incorporate a conventional cold plate 110, disposed adjacent to a circuit module or chip (not shown). In this case, the cold plate 110 comprises a number of internal fins/ribs 120 and is attached to the back of the module or chip. Cooling liquid is provided inside the internal ribs or fins 120 of the cold plate from a coolant supply and circulated by entering a coolant inlet 118 and exiting through outlet port 119. Heat from the electronic components is conducted to the mating surface of the cold plate and then into the internal fins or ribs 120 from the surface of the cold plate and is in turn transferred to the cooling liquid by convection. In such arrangements, the coolant liquid would be completely sealed off from the electronic components and only used to provide indirect liquid cooling to the components.
Indirect liquid cooling reduces the need to use air cooling devices but does not provide a complete solution. In many instances, even when indirect liquid cooling methods have been implemented to cool high powered modules, the remainder of the system including the memory and other support modules are still air-cooled. At a data center level, even such partial air cooling represents a significant burden on businesses that incorporate such centers. Due to its drawbacks, in many instances indirect liquid cooling has been limited to cooling processor modules in conjunction with air cooling to dissipate heat from other electronic components. The present invention addresses these shortcomings by providing total liquid cooling techniques that can be used with all electronic components, including processor modules and others such as memory, power and other support modules.